maxniederhofer

0. We'd like to see 0

Arguably charity is the primary moral requirement.

what exactly are you proposing as the mechanism of these power interests pushing this book?

> slating for reviews, inclusion on top lists, discussions on television shows, interviews with author etc.

Are you suggesting there are specific people who are actively pushing this book, who are not directly tied to the marketing of the book?

> yes

since they are "power interests" or some such

> Are you suggesting that power is not a legitimate criterion of social analysis? Just to understand the quotations

What does it mean that "cultural power interests that are interested in stability" (paraphrased) are pushing the book in a way that's more than just marketing?

> It means they are doing it because they don't care about the sales, they care about the message being spread widely.

I'm not saying it's coordinated. I'm not saying it's some sort of conspiracy. But yeah, it's clearly more than "some people like this book"

I think there's more to it than that. The book proposes a return to a classical rational-modern worldview with typical liberal values ("Enlightenment"). That optimistic view of the future would be one way out of the tribalist identity politics that, fueled by fear, are ruining Western society. There are big power interests, both financial and cultural, that are interested in stability. Pushing Pinker's book is more than just marketing.

Saving you a click: with 95% confidence, humans are predicted to go extinct between 5,100 and 7.8 million years from now.

The prediction seems neither very robust (normal distribution?), nor very useful.

Great. Lmk if I can facilitate an intro. You'd be joining a great list of customers: http://kontakt.io/our-customers/

Business models are very well defined. The online business models are product/service sales, subscription, retail, commission, advertising and digital licensing.

The pitch types listed are a good start, but are neither mutually exclusive, nor wholly exhaustive.

The main difference, to me, is that Doctorow has a less offensive way of making the case than RMS and hence might actually be taken seriously.

They knew this was open. They even took it out of their robots.txt :)

https://www.americanexpress.com/robots.txt

User-agent: * Disallow: /us/admin/ Disallow: /us/heroes/ Allow:

Even if all your arguments are true, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the "top tastemaker" also needs to be CEO of the company.

It's very addictive. One of the few use cases where I actually enjoyed the game-like features.

This reminded me of Jacques Mattheij's list of ideas for startups (see http://jacquesmattheij.com/My+list+of+ideas+for+when+you+are...):

"(45) OpenPapers

A place where all academic research that has been funded in part by public funds is published, journals be damned. Hopefully with deep pockets to fight off the lawsuits."

They're not using a destination URL that redirects or acts as a bridge page. They're using a redirect to the destination URL.

If any HN users want to chat about integrating Qwerly, I'm the founder and available at max@qwerly.com. API is here: http://dev.qwerly.com/.

This is one of the reasons I started Qwerly (http://qwerly.com/), so the web would have portable contacts between sites and a meta-graph across all platforms.

I resubmitted this because I really do want advice.

http://qwerly.com, a people search for the social web. Currently works like a whois for Twitter: put in a Twitter username, get back a page with links to that person's other social web profiles.

(Tried to submit it as a Rate My Startup last week, but got nixed.)

I'm the founder: ask me anything.

I'm doing a bunch of customer development at the moment. Would love to chat before you use it in production somewhere.

See e.g. http://qwerly.com/twitter/parislemon, http://qwerly.com/twitter/scobleizer, http://qwerly.com/twitter/paulg

We just launched what you're talking about: http://qwerly.com.

The API documentation is here: http://qwerly.com/about_us/api

Let me know how you get on (email is in my HN profile) or @maxniederhofer on Twitter.

Interesting that they didn't pick a Finn this time. I heard from a friend there that they were actively trying to recruit to build a succession pipeline of Finns.

If you don't know him, here's a video of Elop speaking at Web 2.0 Expo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHKMUHvb2iE.

I like the serendipity of discovering stuff this way. The selection of videos is pretty good.

I think the original term is "Spray and Pray" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spray_and_pray).

London, UK.

Pre launch product, http://qwer.ly. Working on internet identity and disrupting the social media silos. Be the first employee. Rails experience. Looking for someone who is highly intelligent, fun, productive, ambitious, looking for a challenge at a startup. Can accomodate flexible hours/part-time work beside university or a soul-sucking job.

I've previously founded a successful startup and been an investor in a highly successful one. Three years VC experience, now back to the more exciting side of the table.

An option for you guys could be to wait until you do your first round of funding and have the incoming investors buy him out. I've seen that done before and it worked well.

Lesson: always include an option to redeem the shares of a founder who leaves. Redemption can specify whether that takes place at nominal or market value of the shares. There should be a good leaver/bad leaver clause that outlines what happens if a founder is fired or leaves voluntarily.

I wonder if Facebook would have done better if they had started charging power users. If users were the customers Facebook would have avoided this whole mess. Assuming a reasonable $10/month per power user, a conversion rate of 2-3%, at 500 million users they'd be generating $1.2-$1.8 billion in high-margin revenue. Instead, users are the product. Advertisers are the customers. And Facebook is generating maybe $1B in lower-margin revs. Admittedly the growth prospects of being the big display advertising/lead gen platform are better than being the leading social network.

On the other hand, isn't this great for HN users? Facebook is screwing up in some core areas. Up and at'em, I say!

The same things is happening with Twitter. It was just a cool little thing to do at the beginning, then they had issues scaling, now they're just co-opting whatever worked well in the ecosystem. It's the same bait-and-switch, just with developers around the API as the losers.

It's hard to put a value on the freedom to, at a moment's notice, get up and go wherever you please, without having to rely on anyone or anything. It's what continues to attract people to individual transport.

Sorry, that was confusing indeed. It's late/early here.

Persuasive, not binding is correct. But in practice the authority of the court is such that most lesser courts will honor it. I was also wrong on the "highest appeals court" count - if the issue is of constitutional interest, there is the Federal Constitutional Court.